Rivals Unafraid to Borrow, or Steal, From Each OtherBy JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: February 23, 2009

Early in his tenure as chairman of the Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner said he became so frustrated with the competitive advantage that Nickelodeon held over the Disney Channel among young cable viewers that he set about poaching a cadre of Nickelodeon executives, including Rich Ross, who now oversees the Disney Channel.

Nick at Nite
The cast of “Glen Martin DDS,” about an eccentric dentist’s family, which will start on Nick at Nite this summer.
“Although Disney has its own ethos,” Mr. Eisner said in a recent interview, “Nickelodeon was a model.”

For Nickelodeon, it seems, turnabout has been fair play. Cyma Zarghami, the longtime president of Nickelodeon, has been fighting some of the recent successes of the Disney Channel — including the hit series “Hannah Montana” and the “High School Musical” movie franchise — with some Disney fairy dust of her own.

This summer, in its prime-time Nick at Nite program block, Nickelodeon will introduce “Glenn Martin DDS,” an animated series about the dysfunctional family of an eccentric dentist that was presented to Ms. Zarghami by Mr. Eisner, who left Disney in 2005 and now works part time as an independent producer.

Next month Nickelodeon will introduce “Penguins of Madagascar,” a Saturday-morning animated series featuring some of the characters of the “Madagascar” movies, which was brought to Nickelodeon by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is now chief executive of DreamWorks Animation but who was for many years the head of Disney Studios. And in the most direct, tip-of-the-mouse-ears to its rival, Nickelodeon began trying to build its own “High School Musical” when “Spectacular” — an original, feel-good musical about a high school show choir — had its premiere on Nickelodeon on Feb. 16.

“I think they tapped into a genre that had been sleepy,” Ms. Zarghami said, referring to the global audience that Disney has corralled with “High School Musical.” “Now, it’s a genre that is open for everybody.”

While much of Nickelodeon’s daytime and weekend night programming is aimed at children 2 to 16, those efforts — which Ms. Zarghami, 46, has led for nearly a decade — have produced grown-up revenue.

Viacom, the parent of Nickelodeon, does not disclose the channel’s earnings, but the research company SNL Kagan estimates the combined revenues of Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite to have been $2 billion in 2008. That, by Kagan’s math, represented an increase of nearly $140 million, or 7.4 percent, over 2007, and $240 million, or 13.7 percent, over 2006.

And yet, however much she may be nodding to Disney, Ms. Zarghami’s broad strategy for the main Nickelodeon channel has centered on the philosophy that has guided Nickelodeon since soon after its founding three decades ago: capturing viewers from “cradle to grave,” as Judy McGrath, the chairwoman of MTV Networks (and Ms. Zarghami’s boss) put it in a recent interview.

As “Hannah Montana” became a phenomenon on the Disney Channel, Ms. Zarghami found a means of counterattack within Nickelodeon’s own stable: she built a show, “iCarly,” around the actress Miranda Cosgrove, then 14 and a co-star of the hit Nickelodeon series “Drake and Josh.”

That move has paid off: last year, according to Nielsen Media Research, each episode of “iCarly” drew an average of 2.6 million viewers, nearly 350,000 more than “Hannah Montana,” though still not as many as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the goofy cartoon that has anchored the Nickelodeon lineup for a decade. (Because both channels show multiple episodes from their series throughout the day, those averages include original episodes and repeats.)

In an effort to build on the success of “iCarly,” Ms. Zarghami introduced the series “True Jackson VP” last fall. It stars Keke Palmer as a 15-year-old executive in a fashion company. With each episode drawing an average of 2.2 million viewers since September, according to Nielsen, the audience of “True Jackson” has itself been competitive with “Hannah Montana.” “True” has, however, lagged behind “The Suite Life on Deck,” a recent spinoff of Disney’s “Suite Life of Zack and Cody.”

In a further indication of how hard it can be to replicate the Disney buzz, the estimated 3.3 million viewers who tuned in to the premiere of “Spectacular!” on Nickelodeon on Feb. 16 represented about 1.3 million fewer than watched the premiere of a competing original movie, “Dadnapped,” on the Disney Channel at the same time.

Meanwhile, to ensure that the parents of children tuning in to Nickelodeon’s daytime fare gather together in front of the TV at night, Ms. Zarghami added the syndicated series “George Lopez” to the Nick at Nite lineup in September 2007. It was originally shown on ABC but struggled to find an audience.

To put the success of Ms. Zarghami’s bet on “George Lopez” in perspective, consider that the 1.4 million viewers who, on average, watched each episode of the series on Nick at Nite in 2008 represented more than twice as many as watched “Sex and the City” in syndication on TBS, and nearly three times as many as watched “The Sopranos” on A&E, according to Nielsen.

When asked by phone recently whether he could have imagined doing so well against such competition, Mr. Lopez said, “I’m not as beautiful as the women on ‘Sex and the City,’ but I am as dysfunctional.”

He added, “It was a risk that a show that wasn’t incredibly successful in production could have a life in syndication, and that decision right there was the big one Cyma made.”

In an attempt to extend the association of the Nickelodeon brand to two sister cable channels, Ms. Zarghami is expected to announce soon that it intends to change the name of one channel, the N, which is aimed at teens, to TEENick, and that another, Noggin, will henceforth be known as Nick Jr.

Ms. Zarghami brings to Nickelodeon the perspective of a lifer: she joined the channel in 1985 as a data-entry clerk, a year after graduating from the University of Vermont. Since then she appears to have been guided as much by the shows she watched growing up as by the tastes of her family. (She has three sons, ages 12, 6 and 2, with her husband, George, a former Nickelodeon production executive.)

Ms. Zarghami is the second-oldest of four children of an Iranian-born doctor and Scottish-born nurse, and was born in Iran, before moving eventually to Englewood, N.J. “Ours was the typical Friday night of my generation,” she said. “It was ‘Love American Style,’ ‘The Partridge Family,’ ‘The Brady Bunch,’ ‘The Odd Couple.’ ”

Mr. Katzenberg, the DreamWorks executive, said that “being a mom is so invaluable” to Ms. Zarghami’s “understanding of her constituency out there.” But he added that in watching her response to the Disney Channel, he had noted other traits.

“She will look at that and say, ‘Nice for them, here’s how I’m going to beat them,’ ” he said. “She then puts on the flak jacket and the crash helmet, puts the bayonet in between her teeth and heads into the trench to do battle.”

Very interesting indeed. Nickelodeon has been trying its best at following on Disney's steps for the last couple of years or so, and though some of its shows could be considered good competitors to those of Disney Channel, truth is you can tell the Disney earmarks on many recent Nick shows from a mile.

Now, and this is entirely in the "what if" world of thought (I'm bored, bear with me!), what would happen if Disney Channel and Nickelodeon merged? More exactly, what if the mouse ate the orange bug?

Let me elaborate. Disney has been producing many live action shows lately, focused on kids 11-12 and on. Some of its best shows have even seen spin-offs, like the recent incarnation of Zak and Cody's "Leisure Life". Nick, on the other hand, was known for being a successful producer of animated features, not necessarily targeting only toddlers and elementary school kids; Avatar was (is?) a very good example of this, developing a multi-chapter, multi-book story that draws heavily on many Orient traditions and imagery (as well as Western stereotypes!), packed with action, suspense, comedy, and why not? even some hints of romance and tragedy. Yeah, it's a cartoon, but an adult can enjoy it for its contents.

As for Disney, they too produce (or used to produce) very good animated features, particularly movies, but I haven't seen much animation coming from Mouseland, USA lately.

So, what if those two joined forces, Nick devoting itself to produce good animation, perhaps even using some Disney characters, and Disney focused on creating good live action shows like the original Hannah Montana or HSM?

Think of it as a Jetix-Disney kind of merger; instead of trying (rather unsuccessfuly, mind you) to compete with Disney, Nick could use its resources AND those of Disney to create decent animation again; I bet that would revive the Nickelodeon franchise quite a bit, huh? what you think?

NOOO WAYYYY YOUR IDEA OF NICK BEING KNOWN FOR IT'S BEST- ANIMATION SEEMS QUITE WRONG... I MEAN IT HAS MADE HITS WITH CARTOONS AND SO HAS DISNEY BUT NICK'S SHOWS LIKE 'iCarly', 'Drake & Josh' even 'Zoey 101' have been SUCCESS!
Those shows are Disney's main competition with Live Action! butttt seeee it seeems like Nick is stealing ideas of these type shows from Disney but over a decade ago NICKELODEON RULED WITH THIS STUFF, NO DOUBT- KENAN & KEL, ALL THAT, FIGURE IT OUT etc.... Disney was known for more Lizzie Mcguire type stuff...

I know, and that's the point: a decade ago, Nick's shows were quite original and different, but now...

I must admit I haven't seen iCarly; and am only recently discovering some of Nick's older shows (down where I live, they don't air much of Nick's good stuff at night), so, to me, Nickelodeon was always mainly a cartoon channel. And some of them were really good; if I ever started watching Nickelodeon was because of some of the older cartoons they aired there, not the live action shows.

But, independently of that, truth is Nickelodeon, at large, is not what it used to be a couple of years ago; maybe this attempt to compete with Disney was not as good idea as it might have appeared at first. So, the idea is still that: what if those two networks merged? maybe, instead of competing with each other and churning out stuff that is clearly inspired by the competition, they could come out with some good stuff to revive the orange franchise.

This is DISNEY we are talking about... they'll be quick with the lawsuits!

What's funny is that they don't seem to be afraid of each other as much as they are afraid of poor 20 year old's on YouTube who DO NOT make a profit off of using their stuff, whereas Nick is gonna make hundreds of thousands of dollars off the penguins crap. Madagascar sucked anyway... both of them...

Very interesting indeed. Nickelodeon has been trying its best at following on Disney's steps for the last couple of years or so, and though some of its shows could be considered good competitors to those of Disney Channel, truth is you can tell the Disney earmarks on many recent Nick shows from a mile.

Now, and this is entirely in the "what if" world of thought (I'm bored, bear with me!), what would happen if Disney Channel and Nickelodeon merged? More exactly, what if the mouse ate the orange bug?

Let me elaborate. Disney has been producing many live action shows lately, focused on kids 11-12 and on. Some of its best shows have even seen spin-offs, like the recent incarnation of Zak and Cody's "Leisure Life". Nick, on the other hand, was known for being a successful producer of animated features, not necessarily targeting only toddlers and elementary school kids; Avatar was (is?) a very good example of this, developing a multi-chapter, multi-book story that draws heavily on many Orient traditions and imagery (as well as Western stereotypes!), packed with action, suspense, comedy, and why not? even some hints of romance and tragedy. Yeah, it's a cartoon, but an adult can enjoy it for its contents.

As for Disney, they too produce (or used to produce) very good animated features, particularly movies, but I haven't seen much animation coming from Mouseland, USA lately.

So, what if those two joined forces, Nick devoting itself to produce good animation, perhaps even using some Disney characters, and Disney focused on creating good live action shows like the original Hannah Montana or HSM?

Think of it as a Jetix-Disney kind of merger; instead of trying (rather unsuccessfuly, mind you) to compete with Disney, Nick could use its resources AND those of Disney to create decent animation again; I bet that would revive the Nickelodeon franchise quite a bit, huh? what you think?

Spooky, this was just announced:

Quote:

Jetix is to be rebranded to Disney XD by the end of the year.

The channel, which launched in the UK as Fox Kids in October 1996 and became Jetix in January 2005, is to be aligned with the global Disney XD brand that replaced Toon Disney in the US last month.

The new branding is designed to appeal to boys aged 6 to 14. Programming is not expected to significantly change from the current mix of live-action and animated shows around action and adventure themes.